Berkelium's name honours the city and university of Berkeley, California, the great workshop of element-making where Seaborg's group created one new element after another. The choice was made by analogy with the element directly above it in the periodic table, terbium, which is named for the Swedish village of Ytterby; just as terbium honoured the place where the lanthanides were unravelled, berkelium honoured the place where the actinides were being built. The parallel is a small joke of the discoverers, matching a place-named lanthanide with a place-named actinide beneath it.
Berkelium has no ancient, mythological or alchemical tradition, being a synthetic element of the mid-twentieth century; its significance is as a stepping-stone, a rare and precious target material from which the heaviest elements of all, including tennessine, have since been forged. Chemists studying berkelium have found it can, unusually among the later actinides, be stabilised in a plus-four oxidation state much like its lanthanide analogue cerium, a chemical echo across the two f-block series that helps researchers test theoretical models of how electrons behave in the heaviest, least-studied corners of the periodic table.